Beat the Coronavirus blues with a weekend hike

One of the ways my family has been trying to escape the Coronavirus blues is to hike a new trail each weekend. We did it again Sunday, and I have to believe it’s what’s keeping us all from going insane.

One good thing that’s come out of this Coronavirus pandemic has been the urge to get off the couch and go do something. I’ve never had a problem with that – I can’t sit still for more than about five minutes. But my boys tend to be a little more appreciative of down time than either my wife or me. But as the days turned to weeks in this shutdown, they’ve been getting more and more antsy about being cooped up inside.

For the past several weekends, we’ve decided to beat the lockdown blues by heading to a new place to do some hiking. We explored many of the closer areas earlier in the pandemic, when we hiked most of the trails in Curt Gowdy State Park and the Vedauwoo Recreation Area. This past weekend, to celebrate Mother’s Day, we went a little farther and checked out some trails we’d never seen in Guernsey State Park.

I hope we continue this ritual. It’s certainly been good for me to get out of the house and get some fresh air. Not to mention exercise. With the gym being closed, and even now that it’s open, having all sorts of weird rules, I just don’t get the exercise I’ve come to realize I really need. But these weekend hikes are helping me out to some degree, especially when I take the camera bag with me. I can’t seem to decide on one lens to take when I go, so my bag weighs about 40 pounds. That’s plenty of weight to turn an easy hike into a pretty good workout.

And going to new places makes it feel less like exercise and more like an adventure. I think we’ll keep doing this after the pandemic has passed. There are plenty of trails to hike in Wyoming, so we should never run out of new things to see.

Don’t pack your pillowcase and wander out into the woods in the middle of the night to hunt snipe around here. Snipe are actually real birds, and they’re legal to hunt. And the season’s open right now.